Environmental Sustainability and Cost-Benefit Analysis

Edward Barbier, Anil Markandya and David Pearce

Environment and Planning A, 1990, vol. 22, issue 9, 1259-1266

Abstract: Efforts to ‘operationalize’ a concept of sustainability into appraisal methods for practical decisionmaking have been few and generally unpersuasive. In this paper it is argued that this need not be the case if a set of environmentally compensating, or ‘shadow’, projects within an overall portfolio are used to ensure a sustainability objective of setting a constraint on the depletion and degradation of the stock of natural capital. This can be achieved through both a ‘weak’ and a ‘strong’ sustainability criterion. In both cases the resulting optimum differs from the efficient optimum of the conventional cost-benefit criterion, but the basic cost-benefit model remains intact.

Date: 1990
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Chapter: Environmental sustainability and cost–benefit analysis (1998)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envira:v:22:y:1990:i:9:p:1259-1266

DOI: 10.1068/a221259

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